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College basketball star Len Bias died of a powder cocaine overdose while celebrating his number one draft pick in the 1986 NBA Draft. Because his death was widely, although mistakenly, thought to be due to a crack cocaine overdose, the public and the federal government responded alike -- with panic about the perceived heightened dangers of crack cocaine. This panic served to advance the national war on drugs that was already well underway.

Retroactive application of the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) which became law in 2010 and reduced the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1 has been a hotly contested issue in the criminal justice space. The primary concern from those opposed to retroactivity, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is that allowing offenders to petition the court for a review and reduction in their sentence could result in violent criminals being released to the streets, putting public safety at risk.

Earlier this year, FreedomWorks released a letter of support for the Smarter Sentencing Act. The bill was introduced by unlikely pair of senators, Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and would lower but not eliminate federal mandatory minimum sentences for low-level, nonviolent offenders and expand the "safety valve" to these sentences to reduce big government's role in the courtroom.

This morning, after months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), unveiled a historic justice reform compromise. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would bring a number of reforms to the federal prison system, including an expansion of the "safety valve" exception to mandatory minimum sentences, the creation of a second "safety valve," and rehabilitative programs designed to reduce recidivism, or repeat offenses.

Over the past several weeks, President Barack Obama has increasingly spoke of the need to reform the United States' justice system. In mid-July, for example, he spoke at the NAACP's annual convention in Philadelphia and called for reform of costly and unjust mandatory minimum sentences and, later, appeared at a federal prison in Oklahoma to further emphasize the need to overhaul the justice system to lower repeat offender rates.